I Like to Watch

Jan. 6, 2008 | Let's all write our New Year's resolutions together this year, shall we? "This year, I won't be the weak, flawed, ungrateful, disorganized, fault-finding, lazy, self-serving, incompetent, scattered, resentful, inconsiderate, neurotic, negative, recalcitrant, sluggish, disturbed, thoughtless, pushy, intrusive, hair-trigger, gossiping, selfish, shallow, distracted, inexpressive, restless, confrontational, overdramatic, narrow-minded, unsympathetic, disheveled, slouchy, grumpy, disgusted, superior, self-righteous, impatient, sloppy, obnoxious, nitpicking, eye-rolling, unhelpful, smug, drunk, smelly, flabby, unhygienic, rambling, repetitive, tedious, unoriginal, self-involved, self-pitying, self-destructive, self-congratulatory bore that I've been for my entire life.

"This year I will be different. I'll try harder, work longer, eat healthier, exercise more, read more, sleep better at night, be nicer, hold my tongue, help others, spend more time with my kids, vacuum more often, keep my desk straight, answer the phone more often, act like I'm happy to hear from the bloviating mouth-breather on the other end of the line, improve my attitude, breathe more deeply, learn to cook better, lavish praise on my spouse, sod my lawn, spend less money on pointless things, write thousands of brilliant words a day, exceed expectations, stay focused, live in the present, be open and vulnerable, work hard to effect change in the world, embrace the universe and all its creatures, and shower more often.

"In 2008, I will be a joy to be around. People will no longer say, 'There goes that weak, flawed, ungrateful, self-congratulatory bore.' They'll smile and feel inspired by my open, helpful attitude and my stylish, fit appearance. I'll ride on a wave of easy laughter, I'll listen with true focus and deep understanding. My hair will shine in the sun and my ass will have the shape and density of a basketball, but I'll be too busy finishing my latest literary masterpiece to notice."

You see, by writing down all of our divergent, overreaching goals for the new year, we arrive at the true aim of our resolutions: rededicating ourselves to maintaining the status quo for another year. We begin the process with hope and inspiration, and end it with the self-loathing and malaise that leads us right back to being the weak, flawed, ungrateful, self-congratulatory bores we've been for our entire lives.

An apt exercise to ring in an election year, don't you think?

Down in the hole
Yes, just as it's not possible to be a good, smart, uncompromising, idealistic human being and become president of this nation of thieving whores, so, too, is it impossible to spend more time with your kids and hold your tongue. There is no one on the face of the Earth who writes works of literary genius and has an ass like a basketball. Intensely creative geniuses do not answer the phone with a happy voice, listen with focus or even shower regularly. If you've read about people like this, people who are friendly and smell good and also write brooding masterpieces and have rock-hard glutes, you are reading works of propaganda, created by corporate publicity machines that want you to believe that you were born dumb, lazy and ugly and you can only buy your way out of it. Yes, it's true, you were born stupid, slow and stinky, but so were the rest of us.

And even if it were possible to be good and brilliant and healthy and full of high-minded principles, you still wouldn't get very far in this world, populated as it is by self-serving thugs and charismatic charlatans and oily tricksters and uninspired, beaten-down drones who experience talent and originality and bold, new ideas as, at best, an inconvenience and at worst a direct threat.

Just ask David Simon, creator of "The Wire", which returns to HBO on Sunday night (9 p.m. EST) for its fifth and final season. In the dystopian vision of Baltimore that Simon depicts, personal responsibility and ethical standards are consistently crushed by the greed and thoughtlessness of high capitalism. If those with principles and talent ever manage to wriggle their way into the circles of influence, they'll inevitably be exposed to countless indignities and insults until their most cherished beliefs and their strong commitment to public service are abandoned for the cynic's weary sigh. In Simon's Baltimore, self-serving politicians and careerist law-enforcement officials and scheming drug dealers are cut from the same short-sighted cloth.

And maybe that's a vision that's a little too dark for most Americans, who prefer the manic cheer of morning shows and upbeat radio hosts, who chow down Happy Meals and forsake updates on the Iraq war for "Dance War: Bruno and Carrie Ann." But for those who find almost every single aspect of American culture at this particular moment deeply disturbing, for those who've cringed as self-interested blowhards ran our once-at-least-somewhat-honorable nation into the ground in the name of "freedom," Simon's vision looks right on the money.

Now typically, self-righteous anger at the state of the world is more likely to yield a rambling, unreadable blog entry than it is to produce a work of art this nuanced and wise and brave and lovely. But in the show's final season, Simon and his writers don't just trot out a few new plot twists and wind up for a big ending. No. Every single scene of "The Wire" is meticulously scripted and dramatically riveting. In each scene, we witness a character experiencing a dilemma, infused with passionate impulses, conflicting emotions and inner turmoil. Whether we see a young drug dealer who's rising in Marlo's ranks become party to a crime that makes him disgusted with his life or watch a once-idealistic mayor struggle to solve budget problems without selling his principles up the river, Simon and his writers make big, uneasy problems feel intimate and personal. In our day-to-day lives, it's not hard for most of us to skip the news item about the neglect of our public schools or the endless corporate takeovers threatening to all but eviscerate the richness of American culture. But Simon and his writers force us to look directly at the human face of what it all means, the price we pay in American lives for our sloppy, neglectful policy choices.

[Minor spoilers ahead! Don't read any more if you don't want to know any details or minor spoilers from the first few episodes of the fifth season of "The Wire."]

While in past seasons, "The Wire" has explored the police department, the ports, City Hall and the public schools of Baltimore, this season, "The Wire" invades the offices of the Baltimore Sun, where the editors and city reporters try to cover important stories despite increasing cutbacks and buyouts by the paper's parent company, the Tribune. Immediately it becomes clear that to Simon, who was once a reporter at the Sun, newspapers play a vital role in keeping a city honest, holding its officials and leaders accountable to its citizens, and informing the populace of the crimes and injustices unfolding among them. His is an idealistic vision of what a newspaper should be, one that young people who've always received their news from the Internet or from "The Daily Show" can't begin to understand. This disconnect makes Simon's portrait all the more devastating. Easy as it is to take newspaper writers waxing nostalgic about the glory days of newspapers with a grain of salt, "The Wire" presents characters that make you feel this loss in a palpable way. It's a testament to the corporate pillaging of the news that's occurred over the last two decades that it doesn't even occur to most of us to expect more from our local newspapers than a handful of wire stories and a few relevant but buried pieces about local crime or politics, languishing in the entrails of the Metro section.

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